“Hughes has heard more strange stories than he’s told—even though he’s been managing to tell quite a few, especially with this book. But with his ears so attuned to astonishing, sublime, scary, or fever-dream-like anecdotes, it allows him to infuse refreshing strangeness into gruff but poignant 10-page portraits of otherwise highly relatable underdogs, outcasts, anxiety-cases, ambitious dreamers, and affable working-class heroes.”
— Jeff Milo, Deep Cutz

Interviews:

WE’RE ALL JUST MAKING IT UP: TALKING WITH STEVE HUGHES, published in RUMPUS, January 11, 2019. An Interview by author Andy Mozina

Driven by artists and fringe-dwellers in a down-but-not-out Detroit, the stories of Steve Hughes’s outstanding debut collection Stiff run on sex, controlled substances, and music. A dry absurdist humor energizes these takes on charged and troubled lives: see a cowboy ride a horse down the streets of Detroit, see a man in a bird suit take flight, see the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” set a couple to ecstatic naked dancing in a club. There are also pheasants, heroin, and fire. Hughes has had his ear to the concrete (and bar tops) of the Motor City since moving there in 1995, and he’s come up with a book that Donald Ray Pollock deems “astounding,” claiming:

…[it] reads as if Franz Kafka and Denis Johnson hooked up in one of the meaner sections of Detroit and spent the next year together in an abandoned pizza parlor writing short stories. Yes, it is that damn good.

I’ve had the pleasure of observing the action in Steve’s art gallery and performance space called Public Pool in Hamtramck, MI. It’s a distribution hub for his long-running zine, Stupor, and it’s the site of his reading series, the Good Tyme Writers Buffet, a pretension-free zone, featuring a pot luck buffet, provocative art on the walls, and storytelling. There’s no stage or podium at the Good Tyme Writers Buffet. The writers on that evening’s menu just stand on the floor in front of their peers and talk their stories, one person to another. I don’t know another writer who conceives of their short fictions first as publicly spoken stories, as Steve does. He’s sort of the punk Homer of Detroit.

I interviewed Steve via email after having read Stiff and listened to a cassette of his band, The Stupor Sound Experience, playing some soul-jarring songs. . . . READ MORE

—Andy Mozina, author of the novel Contrary Motion, and the short story collections Quality Snacks and The Women Were Leaving The Men

 

AUTHOR’S HOMAGE TO HAMTRAMCK, published in the Hamtramck Review, January 11, 2019 by Alan Madlane 

Local resident Steve Hughes must be a pretty interesting guy. That’s a conclusion easily reached once you start reading about his background.
A Hamtramck resident, Hughes is probably best known to townies as the co-founder of the Public Pool art space on Caniff St. at Gallagher.

Serving as both art gallery and performance-slash-meeting space, Public Pool has been packing them in since 2010, in a way that manages to be both cozy (the space is small as galleries go) and yet showy (the big glass window façade, bright lights and hipsters spilling out the doorway make it hard to miss).

But, as with so many art types these days, Hughes is a multi-faceted threat. He publishes a zine called “Stupor,” filled with literary pieces culled from his gentle eavesdroppings on local barflies; runs the Public Pool; works on his books of stories; and is always scoping the city for more.
We caught up with Hughes by email. . . . READ MORE

TALL TALES: STEVE HUGHES SPINS SURREAL STORIES IN “STIFF”
published in PULP by Patti F. Smith

“Longtime Hamtramck resident Steve Hughes is a force of nature in his hometown.” . . . READ MORE